When Harvard gets Schooled
“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.
Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
Authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestinian Solidarity Committee and co-signed by over thirty other student groups at the elite university, this statement has started to cause problems for its signatories.
Resignations have occurred. Groups have backtracked. Names have been sealed. Why? Because for once in their life, these kids are going to be on the receiving end of the anger that they often direct at others.
Responses to the horror in Israel have been varied. Whilst a good majority of people are horrified by the atrocities that have been committed, not everybody has been so sympathetic. Some have outright celebrated what has happened. Others have been more measured in their response, instead doing the ‘both sides’ tango that they are excellent at dancing.
Such an example is at play here. The students and societies at Harvard who wrote this letter may not have actually straight up endorsed the atrocities that have occurred, but they did lay the blame squarely at Israel’s feet.
The backlash has been sudden and all-encompassing. Academics, fellow students, businesses, politicians and all other types have roundly criticised the groups and students who signed this letter. Those who have been named have distanced themselves from the letter.
The list of groups and names have been removed from the statement in order to apparently protect them from repercussions. Unfortunately for them, the list remains readily accessible.
If these people were so sure of this viewpoint that they signed a statement such as this, it begs the question: why have they decided to step back?
It’s simple really. They’re terrified of facing the consequences that they demand of others.
Take for example a woman named Ryna Workman, President of the NYU Law Student Bar Association. Ms. Workman, who had been a summer associate of the prestigious Winston and Strawn law firm, had a job offer rescinded by them. She had written a statement online refusing to condemn the actions of Hamas, all while once again blaming Israel.
With such actions costing a student from a top college a job, it’s no wonder that those who signed the Harvard statement are melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West. These students attend the oldest and arguably most elite college in the US, and are primed for their pick of summer internships and jobs in some of the top organisations possible. If their names are attached to controversy, then their necks are on the line.
Considering Harvard students wish to permeate a culture in which one can easily be shunned for their actions, it’s fair that some might be unsympathetic to their plight. In 2020, students petitioned for any official in the Trump administration to be banned from engaging with the college in any official capacity. Its scores on self-censorship and free speech are abysmal. Students actively keep their opinions to themselves. Harvard is no bastion of freedom.
These students don’t care if other people suffer for their thoughts, but God forbid they can’t work for some human rights lawyer during the summer holidays.
For years, there have been people who have believed that the rules don’t apply to them. They have kept themselves on the right side of the opinion divide. Their voices have been the loudest. They’re the good guys. They’ve never had to worry about their views being scorned. They’ve always been safe. Now, however, they’ve crossed the line that they set down, and they’re reaping the consequences.
Considering how many presidents, members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices have attended Harvard, it’s more than likely that these students will be the ones running the country one day. Even if they’re not in the top branches of government, they’ll be the lawyers standing up in court.
Harvard is a place that opens doors. They don’t want those doors slammed in their face. It’s just a pity for them they’re the ones usually on the other side of that door.
On Setting Yourself on Fire
A man sets himself on fire on Sunday afternoon for the Palestinian cause, and by Monday morning his would-be allies are calling him a privileged white male. At the time of writing, his act of self-immolation has already dropped off the trending tab of Twitter – quickly replaced by the Willy Wonka Experience debacle in Glasgow and Kate Middelton themed conspiracy theories.
Upsettingly, it is not uncommon for soldiers to take their own lives during and after conflict. This suicide, however, is a uniquely tragic one; Aaron Bushnell was a serving member of the US Airforce working as a software engineer radicalised by communists and libtards to not only hate his country and his military, but himself. His Reddit history shows his descent into anti-white hatred, describing Caucasians as ‘White-Brained Colonisers’.
White guilt is nothing new, we see it pouring out of our universities and mainstream media all the time. But the fact that this man was so disturbed and affected by it as to make the conscious decision to douse petrol all over himself and set his combat fatigues ablaze reminds us of the genuine and real threat that it poses to us. Today it is an act of suicide by self-immolation, when will it be an act of suicide by bombing?
I have seen some posters from the right talking about the ‘Mishima-esque’ nature of his self-immolation, but this could not be further from the truth. Mishima knew that his cause was a hopeless one. He knew that his coup would fail. He did not enter Camp Ichigaya expecting to overthrow the Japanese government. His suicide was a methodically planned quasi-artistic act of Seppuku so that he could achieve an ‘honourable death’. Aaron Bushnell, on the other hand, decided to set himself on fire because he sincerely believed it would make a difference. Going off his many posts on Reddit, it would also be fair to assume that this act was done in some way to endear himself to his liberal counterparts and ‘atone’ for his many sins (being white).
Of course, his liberal counterparts did not all see it this way. Whilst videos of his death began flooding the timeline, factions quickly emerged, with radicals trying to decide whether using phrases like ‘rest in power’ were appropriate. That slogan is of course only reserved for black victims of white violence.
Some went even further, and began to criticise people in general for feeling sorry for the chap. In their view, his death was just one less ‘white-brained coloniser’ to worry about. It appears that setting yourself on fire, screaming in agony as your skin pulls away, feeling your own fat render off, and writhing and dying in complete torture was the absolute bare minimum he could do.
There are of course those who have decided to martyr and lionise him. It is hard to discern which side is worse. At least those who ‘call him out’ are making a clear case to left leaning white boys that nothing they do will ever be enough. By contrast, people who cheer this man on and make him into some kind of hero are only helping to stoke the next bonfire and are implicitly normalising the idea of white male suicide as a form of redemption.
Pick up your phone and scroll through your friend’s Instagram stories and you will eventually find at least one person making a post about the Israel-Palestine conflict. It might be some banal infographic, or a photo carefully selected to tug at your heart strings; this kind of ‘slacktivism’ has become extremely common in the last few years.
Dig deeper through the content accounts that produce these kinds of infographics however, and you will find post after post discussing the ‘problems’ of whiteness/being male/being heterosexual etc. These accounts, often hidden from view of the right wing by the various algorithms that curate what we see, get incredible rates of interactions.
The mindset of westerners who champion these kinds of statements is completely suicidal. They are actively seeking out allies amongst people who would see them dead in a ditch if they had a chance. Half of them would cheer for you as you put a barrel of a gun to your forehead, and the other half would still hate you after your corpse was cold.
There are many on the right who believe that if we just ‘have conversations’ with the ‘sensible left wing’ we will be able to achieve a compromise that ‘works for everyone’. This is a complete folly. The centre left will always make gradual concessions to the extreme left – it is where they source their energy and (eventually) their ideas. Pandering to these people and making compromises is, in essence, making deals with people who hate you. If you fall into one of the previously discussed categories, you are the enemy of goodness and peace. You are eternally guilty, so guilty in fact that literally burning yourself alive won’t save you.
Photo Credit.